


As long as we're alive

by JuliettaVendetta



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-23 08:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4869878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuliettaVendetta/pseuds/JuliettaVendetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she, by chance, meets Steve and Natasha, she is drawn into a new world full of secret espionage agencies, secrets and international terrorism. But has this world always been strange to her?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. August 27

1\. August 27

An explosion.  
It must have been an explosion, so loud and strong that it made the very ground rumble and a piercing whistle in the ears, drowning out everything else.  
Chaos, everywhere. Screams, but barely audible, as if the TV’s loudspeakers weren’t working properly. Glass on the floor and the smell of fire and smoke.  
Dizzied, she stood up, looking around, until someone grabbed her arm and dragged her away from where she was standing, out of the building. She heard muffled voices, but no distinguished sounds.   
She was sat down about ten yards from the building on the ground. She could hardly see due to the smoke in the building, let alone hear. Only the ringing sound and muffled white noise.  
What had happened? The person who had got her out was already gone.  
Her eyes stopped to water after just a few minutes, and she got up gingerly. Many more people were sitting around the square, some were sitting in groups, others alone, and smoke was coming out of the building she had been in such a short while ago.  
What had happened?  
She was still watching the building’s entrance when she heard the first sirens. Two largely built men were carrying another person out of the doors, but from what she saw, it seemed that it might be too late already for the sirens.  
“Are you okay?”   
She hadn’t realized that the ringing noise had died away. A middle aged man was looking her up and down, looking worried. He had soot smeared over his face.  
“Okay”, was all she said, nodding slightly. “Thanks”, she added, after a few seconds.  
The man gave her a wry smile, patted her once on the shoulder and went to look after an elderly lady, looking lost with a singed handbag dangling from her bloodied arm.  
The first ambulance arrived at the scene, paramedics jumping out of it while people were storming towards it like moths to the light.  
She stood up, but stayed where she was, when suddenly another explosion made the earth tremble and her stumble again. People were running everywhere, screaming in panic. She stayed put, not knowing where to go. Where had the explosion come from? She could see neither fire nor smoke, and the square was nearly empty.  
And there they were. Suddenly they appeared everywhere, seemingly out of nowhere, masked and heavily armed. Then she saw the others, a tall man wearing a round shield and a woman dressed all in black first, then people who looked like a SWAT team from a TV show. The first group opened fire instantly, but she saw the woman take on three men at once, proving to be an equal match for all of them.  
“Come on!” Somebody had grabbed her elbow, dragging her with them. “It’s too dangerous here, got going!”  
She started to move reluctantly, still not sure where it was more dangerous, since the masked man had appeared from everywhere. The person dragging her was already gone.  
After a few steps, she turned around once again, cursing herself for doing so. She felt the gaze of the tall man with the shield, fighting two gunmen at once, linger on her for the fraction of a second, when she saw another masked attacker behind him, aiming for his head.   
“Behind you!”, she screamed without thinking.  
She saw him turn around and throw his shield at the masked man, knocking him out instantly.  
She heard them scream words in a language that felt vaguely familiar. She heard more shots. She was knocked down by the pain. Everything was quiet, and all she could hear was her own breathing, fast and shallow, panicked. She couldn’t locate the pain and heat and cold rushed over her.  
“… still alive, get us a heli,” she heard someone say. A woman, by the sound of the voice. She felt pressure on her stomach and a tough hand on her shoulder, along with excruciating pain. “Stay with me, okay?”, the woman said.  
She wanted to scream, but her lungs wouldn’t fill with enough air.


	2. August 31

2\. August 31

Flickering lights, so loud. And voices. Strange sounds, flickering lights, alien voices.  
Now, she heard nothing but a steady, electric beeping. No voices, no flickering lights.  
How long had she been gone?  
Slowly, so very slowly, she opened her eyes. A dim light greeted her, like an artificial winter’s sun. The throbbing pain in her head caused little stars to appear before her eyes. She wanted to sleep… just sleep.  
“Stay with me, okay?” A woman came into her sight, with dark hair and a small frame. She tried to focus her gaze on the woman, but the hammer in her head was doing a proper job.  
“What happened?”, she managed to say. Her lips felt dry and chapped.  
The woman came closer.  
“You’ve been shot, three days ago. You’ll survive, no worries there”, she said quietly. “I’ll get a doctor now, yeah? Try to stay awake, okay?”  
She tried to nod, but darkness was creeping back over her. A few moments later, someone came back in the room.  
A hand stroke her cheek, softly. “Just a few more minutes, Miss”, a tall and slender man said. She opened her eyes again. The man wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his neck. He flashed a small torch light in her eyes and prodded the fingers of her left hand. She couldn’t tell whether he was satisfied with the results he got. “How do you feel?”, he asked her.  
She tried to give a sarcastic laugh, but it wouldn’t come out. “Two out of ten”, she said, slowly.  
“Glad you didn’t lose your sense of humour, then”, the doctor said with a smile on his ever blurrier face. “Are you in pain?”  
Closing her eyes, she nodded.  
“I’ll give you something to stop the pain”, she heard him say. And more mumbling and undistinguished voices as she drifted back to sleep.

When she woke up the next time, the hammering in her head was gone. She opened her eyes to what seemed like the broad light of day.  
“There you are” A woman’s voice, deep, yet friendly. She turned her head and saw the woman from the square sitting by her bed. She was wearing a grey leather jacket over a white shirt, her red hair in a ponytail.  
Her breath caught for a moment. “Where am I? What happened?”, she asked.  
“You were shot. Twice, in the shoulder and the abdomen. You lost a lot of blood, but you pulled through… that was three days ago”  
She said nothing. Three days… she’d been gone for three whole days, and it seemed that she was lucky, having lost only three days.  
“We got you out of there ASAP. Doctors say it was a close call, but I don’t think that matters now…” The woman gave her a small smile. “Steve’ll be glad when I tell him you finally woke up. He’s been here until yesterday evening, but I sent him home and took over, since we couldn’t find any family of yours.”  
“I don’t have a family”, she said.  
“I’m sorry to hear that”, the woman answered. “Anyway, I’m not here to remind you of that…” She made an ominous pause. “What do you know about the attack three days ago?”  
“Pardon?”, she asked, taken off guard. She tried to sit up, but a striking pain in her stomach kept her from doing so.  
“Stay down”, the woman said. “We’re not saying it’s your fault. But fact is, they seemed to know you, and they vanished after you were shot. Fact is also that they shot and killed three civilians before they shot you. And finally, they seemed to recognize you, calling the name Tamila before they disappeared. So you will allow me the question”  
“My name is Josephine, not Tamila”  
The woman cocked her head to the left side. “Now”, she said. “That’s interesting”.


	3. September 7

3\. September 7

„Are you sure?“  
„She said they wanted to talk to me ASAP, of course I’m sure”  
“You’re still hospitalized”  
“Like I care”, Jo said loudly. She looked Steve, standing in front of her, up and down. Well, mostly up, since he was about a foot taller than she was. They were standing in the hospital’s foyer, and people were already looking.  
“Look, it’s barely been a week”, he tried to reason with her.  
“Yeah, and you don’t want to give me the chance to finally find out what’s going on exactly?”  
“You know that this is not true” He looked hurt, or was she imagining it?  
“I’m sorry”, she said quietly. “But I am going. The question is just whether I need to go alone or you’ll get me there”  
He sighed. “Really”, he said. “I’d much rather you’d stay here and wait ‘til you get the okay”  
“You know better than I do that this is so not going to happen. Besides, I’ll be back afterwards, so what?”  
He rolled his eyes. “Get going”, he said, nodding his head towards the door.   
She stopped a few steps out of the hospital’s entrance. “Where do I need to go?”, she asked.  
“Well, what would you do if you weren’t with me?”  
“I don’t know”, she retorted, exasperatedly. “Get a cab to drive me there, I guess”.  
“Fancy a walk? It’s not even a mile away…”

Ten days ago, she had been shot, and had barely survived. She had been unconscious for three full days, and had met Steve the day after she had woken up.  
He turned out to be the tall man with the shield, fighting the masked gunmen in the square. He said she might have saved his life, and that he owed her.  
He also said that he knew what it was like waking up and having no one to talk to, but he would not say how he knew this, claiming it was classified information, sorry about that. He had visited her every day after that.  
He had been rather stiff, acting somewhat odd at times, especially the first day. As if he was not used to talking to a woman, or people in general, if it came to that. He seemed somewhat old-fashioned, in lack of a better word.

“You’re quiet, Josephine”, he said after they had left the hospital grounds.   
“I told you to call me Jo”, she said, and when he merely grinned she told him how nervous she was.  
“I know”, was all he said.  
“Yeah, sure…”, she answered sarcastically.  
“Now that’s much better,” he grinned.

It was hardly more than half a mile to go. Before she realized it, they were standing in front of a huge, circular, glass and concrete building-complex. Steve led her through a glazed double door, opening automatically, into the main building. Inside, they were met by bustling activity. People in suits and business outfits were walking and running around everywhere. It looked like every other office building she had ever been to, and having majored in IT, she’d been to a lot of them.  
“This way”, Steve said. “Make sure you stay with me”  
He led her through another set of double doors and then to a wall with a line of elevators. Every now and then, he would greet somebody, friendly but somewhat distanced. An elevator opened its doors just as they stopped before it, half a dozen people streaming out, with some of them looking her curiously up and down. They got into the elevator, the door closing right after they entered it, with no one else joining them.  
“Fury”, Steve said to no one in particular.  
“Request approved” A female computer voice sounded in the elevator.  
“I didn’t realize it would be this easy, getting in here…”, she mused.  
“It’s only easy because you’re with me”, he answered. “They wouldn’t have let you through the main gates on your own. Seen how they all sized you up?”  
“Yeah… I was wondering about that”, she said. “But still… no retina-scans, or at least some secret codes, or ID-card swipe things? Nothing?”  
“It’s voice detection, mostly. That and biometric identification. As long as you’re with an agent of a higher level, you’ll get through, but as soon as you’re alone you won’t even get to the cafeteria. The doors simply won’t open”, he replied. “You’re still okay?”  
“What do you mean?”  
“You’re pale”  
She looked at her blurry reflection, with her left arm in a sling, in the glass wall of the elevator. “I’m fine”, she said.  
Steve said nothing in return, but continued to watch her worriedly whenever he thought she wasn’t paying attention, but of course she was.  
The elevator stopped in the 36th floor, but the doors wouldn’t open.  
“Now’s the time for retina-scans”, he said jokingly. He pressed his hand on a display next to the elevator doors, which she hadn’t noticed before. “Okay”, he added, “It’s not a retina-scan, but at least they want fingerprints”. The display lightened up and went dark again. The doors opened after a few more moments, and they entered an empty floor, door after door on one side of the wall, all of which he ignored, heading straight down the hallway. He didn’t pause to knock on the door at the end of the floor, but he just walked in, holding the door open for her to enter the room behind it.

It was a small office without windows, only one desk in it, and behind that desk sat a woman in her early forties, with short blonde hair and glasses, looking up from her paperwork and nodding a greeting.  
“Morning, Cap”, she said. “The boss is waiting for you”   
“Thanks, Fiona”, he replied, and beckoned Jo to follow him.  
They went through another door. The office behind those doors was one of the biggest she had ever seen, the outside wall made of glass and a huge desk before it. Behind the desk sat a black man, probably in his early fifties, bald, with a patch over his left eye. She could see the scarred skin around the eye patch. The man was dressed all in black. He didn’t stand up when they entered the room.  
Steve stopped about halfway before the desk, standing somewhat in front of her. “Close the door, would you, Natasha?” he said. She turned around and stifled a cry when she found the red haired woman standing by the door, closing it.  
“Always at your service, Cap”, the woman said with an ironic grin.  
Now the man behind the desk stood up. “Rogers”, he said, nodding. “And this is our special guest?”  
“You know who she is, Fury”, Steve retorted.  
He seemed different now. Not distant or odd, but confident and in charge.  
“True”, Fury admitted. “Why don’t you sit down?” He beckoned to the chairs in front of his desk.  
Steve nodded, and they sat down. Sitting down was a relief she would never admit. The pain in her stomach had been growing ever worse since they had entered the building, and her knees started to get all wobbly.  
“Miss Josephine Marlow, you said?” Fury looked at her for the first time.  
“Wait”, she answered. “I didn’t say that. It’s my name. I was born with that name”  
“Well, I am sorry to tell you, Miss Marlow, but that might not be the truth”  
She sat motionless, taken aback, staring at Fury. “You’re lying”, she said finally.  
“We ran your name through our software, but to no avail”, he went on, completely ignoring her. “It was only when we matched your photograph with the name Tamila that we got a result. A disturbing one, I might add” He paused.  
“Do you want me to beg for answers?”  
He just raised his eyebrows at her.  
“I asked whether you want me to beg for answers or if you are going to tell me what you found”, she said, more forcefully this time, looking him directly in the face.  
His face split into a crooked grin. “I like your attitude, Miss”, he said. “So what we got was a terrorist cell. They were based somewhere in the Soviet Union, before the 1990’s. We assumed it to have vanished after that, its members either dead or having fled to other countries. They were infamous for abducting children at a young age, training them to be high profile spies and assassins. After the USSR broke apart, some files were found on abducted children and their possible whereabouts. Most of these children were found, executed, in a mass grave in what is today known as Chechnya, but some vanished without a trace, probably dead as well”  
Natasha, now standing next to Steve, caught her breath. Fury looked at her and shook his head, hardly noticeable. She relaxed a little, and Jo focused back on Fury.  
“You’re lying”, she said. When nobody said anything, she went on. “You’re telling me I was born somewhere in the USSR, being abducted when I was a little girl, trained and then what? That is ridiculous, and you know that. I was born and raised in Wisconsin. I have certificates to proof it. I remember growing up in Green Bay. I went to Kindergarten there, I remember it”  
“I’m sorry, but maybe you don’t. These memories could be fake. There was a girl named Tamila among the abducted children, and she was not in one of the mass graves. She has never been found. Using age-progression software on that photograph, some significant points match your pictures. As there are no DNA samples of Tamila, so we have to rely on the photograph and the indication we’ve got”  
“But what use would I be? Not remembering anything at all, what with the fake memories?”, she sad hotly.  
“What about your parents?”, he wanted to know, instead of answering her question.  
“They died five years ago”, she said reluctantly.  
“You were, how old, eighteen?”, he asked.  
She said nothing. How could he know?  
“So, are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Steve sat in his chair, bolt upright, looking alert.  
“We both know what he’s saying, Steve” Natasha’s gaze rested on Fury’s face. “And if we’re right, she might be the perfect sleeper”


	4. September 21

4\. September 21

She had been released from the hospital two weeks after visiting S.H.I.E.L.D. and being told about her past.  
A young agent had taken her to her flat, only to find the door pried open and her small apartment in a chaos. She had to wait by the door, terrified, while Agent Wright searched the two rooms for intruders.  
“This is quite a rough area, you know,“ she said meekly when he came back. “It might not have anything to do with… well…”  
Agent Wright shook his head. “We’ll relocate you,“ he said. “I’m sorry, but you might not be safe here anymore. You should get inside and start packing” This being said, he took out his cell phone and started dialing.  
The rooms had been torn apart, thoroughly so. All the drawers had been torn out, her clothes lay on the floor, the mattress of her bed thrown to the floor and ripped apart. Her pulse running, she pulled her suitcase from the wardrobe and started to sort through her clothes, throwing the pieces that looked whole into it. Then she rummaged through her documents, putting everything important into the suitcase as well. She had just started looking for her laptop when Wright entered the room.  
“I’m almost done,“ she said. “I mean… there really isn’t much left, you know…”  
“I’m sorry,“ he said sympathetically. “But I got you a new flat. We can go as soon as you’re ready”  
“A new flat? How did you manage that?” she asked, completely surprised. It had taken her weeks to find an affordable apartment, even in this area of D.C.  
“It pays, working for the government,“ he grinned.  
“I think they got my computer”, she said.  
“Anything important on it?”  
“Not really, it was quite new,“ she answered, striding through the room to the darts board on the far wall. She took it of, turned it around and reprised a flat metal object. “Looks like they didn’t find the external hard drive”, she said, smiling this time.  
“We should go”, he said. “You want me to take your suitcase?”

The car stopped in front of an old building in a small side street.  
“There’s no elevator, that’s a minus,“ Wright began, heaving her suitcase out of the trunk. “But it’s in a better neighborhood, closer to S.H.I.E.L.D. and we can keep a better eye on you”  
“I’m sorry, but I can never afford this”, she said quietly and stopped in front of the building.  
“Don’t worry,“ he replied. “The rent’s gonna be taken off your salary”  
“Begging your pardon? Salary? What do you mean, salary?”  
“Come in,“ he said and opened the entrance door. “What I mean with salary? Your salary from S.H.I.E.L.D., of course”  
“But I’m of no use,“ she said bitterly.  
“Of course you are. Or will be. This way, follow me”  
They climbed three sets of stairs and then went down a narrow hallway, tinted in the brownish shade of green she associated with the late 1950’s. The linoleum floor was a weird shade of yellowish grey, but otherwise it looked very clean. He stopped after passing two doors and put her suitcase down, then fumbled in his pockets.  
“The apartment is empty at the moment, which means that every agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. can enter it with their ID card and a code. You will be picked up tomorrow morning and brought to the HQ, get your own ID and have the apartment written on your name. That means that no card but yours opens the doors from the outside.” He pulled out his card and swiped it through the reader on the wall next to the door, then entered a code. She heard a soft clicking noise, and he opened the door. “After you,“ he said in a friendly manner.  
She found herself in a living room about the size of her old apartment. At the far wall was a modern-looking kitchenette, along with a table and four chairs around it. There was also a small sofa with a matching table, and even a small TV set.  
“Bigger and better than the old one, I hope?” Wright grinned.  
“Much better” She shook her head in disbelief.  
“The bedroom is over there” Wright said, pointing to the left, where a small hallway led the way to a doorframe without a door in it. She could see part of a bed through it. “Bathroom is right next to it. Of course you can buy new furniture whenever you want,“ he added. “Just tell someone from headquarters before you throw the bed away, you know?” He made for the door.  
“I don’t know what to say”, she said. “Except for, well, thank you…”  
“You’ll be fine”, he replied. “But before I forget, here” He handed her an ID card. “It’s only valid for a day”, he explained. “The code is 69646358, it’s written down here…” He gave her a piece of paper with said code written on it. “Well now, I gotta go to work. Enjoy the rest of your day, ahm…”  
“Jo”, she said.  
He smiled and opened the door. “Bye, Jo,“ he said.   
“Bye,“ she said and watched him walk down the hallway, keeping a foot in the open door. A figure passed him as he went down the stairs. They seemed to exchange a greeting, and the figure drew nearer.  
“Josephine?” It was Steve. He was wearing sports gear, his dark blonde hair a sweaty mess. “What are you doing here?”  
“Looks like I just moved in”, she said.   
“I thought you had an apartment?“ he raised his eyebrows at her.  
“Note the past tense,“ she said. “When we arrived there today the door was pried open and the rooms were taken apart, so Agent Wright decided to… wait, what did he call it?, ah yeah, to relocate me. And well, here I am…”  
He smiled wryly. “I’d say it’s nice to have you here, but given the circumstances…”  
She tried to smile back, but had the impression that it was a rather crooked smile. Nobody said a word for what felt to her like much too long a time. “Well, I should start to… well, get my stuff sorted. Unpack, you know?” she stuttered.  
“Yeah, right, I… I should really take a shower, I’d say. Before I get really smelly and… yeah”  
“So, I… I’ll see you, okay?”  
“Yeah, sure, okay. Ahm. Yeah”  
He turned around and made for his door. She started closing the door to her new flat. Her new, very alien, very empty, very silent flat. She opened the door again, glad to see him still fumbling around with his ID card.  
“Ahm, Steve? I mean, I know I’m being really brash now, but… I can’t be alone tonight… And I excel in ordering pizza”  
He smiled. “Is seven all right?”


	5. November 20

5\. November 20

Three months ago, her life had changed dramatically. Dramatically… what a word.  
Being shot could be enough to be thrown off track for almost any normal person. Being told that your whole life was a lie afterwards was like being slapped in the face. A million times. Squared.

The past weeks had been a constant strain. She would get up early and go to headquarters, where people would try to make her remember.  
It meant constant training in hand-to-hand combat, on different sorts of weapons and whatnot. It meant people interrogating her, sometimes in a language she didn’t understand, for hours at a time, about things she had no idea of. It meant coming home late at night, hardly any sleep and the same procedure starting the next day, every day.  
She had almost given up when two weeks ago during combat training, she disarmed six men in a matter of just a few seconds. She had not realized what she had been doing when suddenly all of them were lying on the ground, clutching their arms, legs, or stomachs respectively, groaning in pain. Fury had been watching her from a distance, nodding approvingly when she looked at him before he disappeared again.  
After that, there were no interrogations anymore, and just the physical training remained.  
She had not seen Steve, or anyone else, for weeks now. Only Fury, and just this once.

Most people avoided her. They would stare at her until she looked back, maybe sometimes reply a greeting, or otherwise ignore her altogether. So she was surprised when one day, when she was sitting in a secluded room all on her own, reading a book, she heard a chair drawn and realized someone was sitting opposite her. She looked up to find herself staring at Natasha, who was watching her expectantly, eyebrows raised an all.  
“Settled in all right?”, she asked.  
“More or less”, Jo said evasively.  
“I heard you pulled quite the berserker two weeks ago” Natasha couldn’t suppress a grin.  
“That’s not funny. Why haven’t I seen you in weeks?”  
“It is funny. And I was away”  
“So we’re talking secret missions?”  
Natasha chuckled. “Maybe we are”  
“Natasha? I was looking for- oh, Josephine”  
It was Steve. He was standing in the doorway, looking lost for words.  
“There you are, what a surprise” Natasha didn’t seem surprised at all. “Checked in with Fury? Come in, sit down, have a chat”  
“In the morning, yeah. Why do you want to know?”, he said, entering the room and sitting down next to Natasha.  
“I thought I’d see you there last night, and seeing as you weren’t there, I thought I’d ask. Did you see him yesterday?” Natasha looked from Steve to Jo.  
“I haven’t seen anyone of you in weeks…” Jo answered.  
“Yeah, I was sort of not available”, Steve said.  
“Did you finally ask Christina on a date?”  
“No, I was too busy”, he said, rolling his eyes.  
“Oh really?, Natasha said teasingly. “So tell me, what’s the Captain doing when he’s busy?”  
“Not telling you, for example”  
Natasha made a face. “You seen Clint?”  
“Standing right behind you”  
Jo looked up to see an unfamiliar man leaning casually in the doorframe. He had short, light brown hair and a genuine smile etched on his otherwise serious face.  
Natasha’s face lightened up the moment she saw him. “Fury wanted to talk to you,” she said.  
“Just been there,” he answered and came into the room, sitting down next to Jo, opposite Natasha and Steve. When he passed her, he lightly touched Natasha’s shoulder. “So you’re the new one,” the man Natasha had called Clint looked at her curiously. “Potential sleeper, hah? Really don’t look the part. Oh my, it never gets boring here, really”  
Jo raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re weird,” she said matter-of-factly.  
Clint’s face broke into a big grin. “Just a joke,” he answered. “But still, it’s an interesting story you’ve got there”  
“I’m not sure I get your definition of interesting,” Jo said slowly.  
“Anyway, Josephine, I’m Clint,” he said in a friendly manner, utterly ignoring her remark.  
“How do you know my name, Clint?”  
“Read your file. It’s a good read, actually”  
“I thought it was restricted?” Steve said, looking at Clint in bewilderment.  
“My clearance level is above the restriction level,” he said dismissively.  
“Anything new in it?” Jo asked. “Last time I looked it said that my real memories start at the age of about fifteen”  
“I repeat – I thought it was restricted?” Now Steve was looking at her, the same looked on his face.  
Jo shrugged. “I hacked into my file from my laptop. At home,” she said. “Since it’s about me I figured I had a right to know about it. Don’t worry, I went to the IT department the next day and told them about the loophole”  
“But you just said the last time”  
“They guys at IT know me quite well by now” Jo could just so suppress a laugh when she saw the smirk on Natasha’s face.  
“I need to go,” Jo said suddenly when she looked at the clock over the door. “My next training session starts in five minutes, and I still get lost all the time I look for the room”  
“Have fun,” Steve said.  
“Haha,” she made sarcastically. “I don’t see the fun in hitting people in the face. I don’t even like touching them”  
“You get used to it,” Clint said. It wasn’t helping.  
She said nothing for a while. “I don’t know”, she sighed, finally. “I’m not cut out for this…”  
“That’s because you don’t remember”, Natasha said sympathetically.  
“But I do remember! I just remember a different past”  
“I never heard about artificial memories before”, Steve mused. It didn’t help.  
“I did, but none of them were this good”, Clint told him. It didn’t help, either.  
“That’s not very helpful”, she said.  
“It gets better” Natasha smiled at her. It might have been genuine.


	6. February 12

„Fury,“ Natasha said when they entered the elevator.  
Jo didn’t even hear the computer voice giving the familiar answer. She looked out of the elevator over the panorama D.C. was giving her today, a rainy, dark version of itself. Her pulse was running, she could feel the blood thumping in her neck and a disturbing white noise in her ears.

Hill had called twenty minutes ago with a message from Fury. An urgent message which told her to come as soon as she could.  
When she had stormed out of her flat, just so remembering to take her ID-card, she had run into Steve in the hallway. He had seemed alert, not his casual, shy self. He had measured her up with a single gaze and she had been wondering whether he had gotten the same call, which he had indeed. He was wearing his shield on his back and she wondered if this was a precaution or serious trouble.  
They had run down the stairs and just as they left the building, a black Corvette screeched to a halt in front of them. Natasha always had a sense for a dramatic entrance. The window was lowered. “Get in, sweethearts,” Natasha said in a mocking voice.  
Steve couldn’t suppress a grin when they entered the car, Jo on the backseat and Steve next to Natasha on the front seat. “And again, you forgot to bring coffee”, he said with a grin that didn’t quite make it to his eyes.  
“It’s not like me to pay for coffee,” Natasha replied with a smirk and set the car in motion again.  
Steve and Natasha engaged in quiet conversation, with Jo looking out of the rear window, the streets blurry in the rain and the speed. What was it that made it this important for her to come to Fury? Nothing much had happened in the past few months, so what was this important now that he had to see her, along with Steve and Natasha?  
They arrived at the Triskelion before Jo had come to a satisfactory answer that didn’t involve alien invasions taking over S.H.I.E.L.D. and holding Fury captive.

“What does he want? Any ideas?” Steve was looking from her to Natasha. Whenever he expected trouble, he only spoke in short, staccato-like sentences.  
She shook her head, startled, and shrugged.  
“No idea,” Natasha said.  
The elevator came to a halt and the display appeared next to the doors, asking for fingerprints. Natasha put her right hand on it and let it scan her hand before it disappeared again and the doors opened.  
Jo had to restrain herself from running down the hallway to Fury’s office, and so she walked there along with Steve and Natasha at a brisk pace. Steve was already through the door to Fury’s office, with Natasha at his heels, turning around at the door and beckoning her to hurry.  
The room was brightly lit, the windows darkened, and Fury and Hill were standing behind the enormous desk, staring silently at a monitor. It was weird. She had been at S.H.I.E.L.D. for several months now, and had never seen Fury staring at a monitor. He always used holographic projections in the middle of the room, reacting on the flick of his hand.  
He and Hill looked up when Jo closed the door behind after entering the room.  
“We’ve got news,” Fury said instead of a greeting. Steve and Natasha were standing in front of the desk by now while Jo was still standing by the door.  
“News?” She asked loudly before she could stop herself. She saw Hill smirk behind Fury’s back, which stopped her from wishing for a hole to disappear in.  
“Why don’t you come closer, Agent Marlow?” Fury said instead of giving an answer. He had never referred to her as an agent before, even though she officially was one. Jo bit her lip and went to the desk, coming to a halt standing next to Natasha.  
“What news?” She repeated calmly.  
Fury made a flicking gesture with his right hand over his desk and a holograph appeared in the middle of the room, almost as high as the office itself, giving away a faint bluish glow. The holograph showed a rough landscape, a rocky area surrounded by conifers laden heavily with snow. A map on the upper right corner located the picture in a remote area of Nunavut, Canada.  
“We found them today,” Fury said while Jo was still staring at the map in the middle of the room.  
Hill came around the desk and stopped before the holograph. “If you look at this,” she said and indicated the rocky ground in the middle of the picture, zooming it in, “you’ll find the rock formation looks out of place. We found this place in a routine satellite check of remote areas, searching for odd and unnatural occurrences. The image flickered and suddenly about a dozen people were in the picture, dressed in thick jackets and armed with assault rifles. Where had they come from? “The image is live from our espionage satellite, updating every thirty seconds,” Hill explained, catching her confusion. “We sent a team up there a few hours ago. They got as far as the point we are looking at right now, giving us indication that there was something going on underground. That was the point when contact broke off. Screams, gunfire, then nothing”  
Jo swallowed hard. This didn’t sound good at all. She looked around at Steve and Natasha, who looked quite serious as well.  
“Why are we here then?” Steve asked finally.  
“Because half an hour ago, another message was transmitted,” Fury said.  
“It was Russian and consisted of only one sentence. Give us the girl or they die. Nothing else,” Hill explained.  
It was like a sucker punch. So that’s why she was here?  
“Of course we’re not going to surrender you,” Fury said before anyone else could think about saying something. “S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Rogers, Romanoff, I want you to get ready, you’re leaving in half an hour. The IT division is still trying to get a way into their database and should be done by the time you take off. You know what I want you to do”  
Steve and Natasha merely nodded when the phone on Fury’s desk started to ring. “Yes?” He said upon taking it. And then, after a short pause, “Send it over” He put the phone down again. “They’re in,” he said. “And they cannot make sense of it”  
The holograph flickered for a second, then row upon row of letters appeared on the screen. They all stared at in silence.  
Steve shook his head, his eyes wide open, having given up immediately.  
“That’s nonsense,” Hill said a few seconds later. “Are they sure it’s real?”  
“They are,” Fury said, not sounding too convinced.  
“Gibberish,” was all Natasha had to say about it.  
Fury nodded and made to wipe the lines from the screen.  
“Wait!” Jo said, astounded by herself.  
“What?” Fury asked.  
“This is… my god, this is just too weird,” she said. “I can’t believe they would do this. This is a mixture of… oh seriously” Jo couldn’t help herself and chuckled. “This is a weird mixture of Klingon, Sindarin, Quenya, and something else”  
“You lost me there,” Natasha said.  
“It’s fictional languages. Lord of the Rings and Star Trek and I don’t know what”  
Fury was staring at her incredulously. “How do you know that?”  
“How do you have an enormous organization at your hand and have no one who has ever heard of it?” Jo replied.  
“We’re dealing with the real world, Marlow. There’s no place for fiction”  
“Well, here’s your real world, correlating with fiction quite all right,” she snapped.  
“Can you read it?” Hill asked.  
“Most of it,” She stepped closer to the holograph. “I’m good wit languages, and I had a lot of spare time in my first year of college,” she added with a look at both Steve and Natasha. “It’s written in some form of a code. I can give you the English words, but I’m not sure I can make sense of it after all,” she said. “It’s quite confused. I can’t make much of it right now, but this one here” She indicated a line in the lower half of the document. “This one tells us how they open the doors. It’s voice detection, like here, but they have code words, as it seems. Every door has another one. No, sorry, not every door, every floor has got another codeword” She scanned the lines again. “They’re all here…”  
Fury and Hill exchanged glances, as did Steve and Natasha. Jo swallowed once more.  
“Get ready, Marlow” Fury’s gaze rested on her. She nodded, suppressing both a hysterical laugh and a terrified scream.  
“That’s ridiculous, Fury” Steve said loudly, taking a step to his left so that now he was standing right between Jo and Fury.  
“It’s the best chance all of us have got,” Hill said soothingly, but she didn’t look too convinced herself.  
“What if it’s a trap?” It was the first time in all those months that Jo had seen Natasha look worried.  
Fury looked from her, to Jo, to Hill, to Steve and back. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sure it is.”


	7. February 12

It was freezing cold. The wind was blowing mercilessly when the glider got down in a dark conifer forest.  
“It’s about a mile to go,” Steve said to no one in particular when they got out of the small glider. They had landed in the middle of the forest so as not to alert the group of terrorists on their arrival and to not give them the chance to kill potential survivors.  
They set to move. Snow was blowing into her face and the wind blew through her thick jacket and the Kevlar vest she wore underneath it.  
One of the members of the S.T.R.I.K.E. team, Rumlow, led the way, looking on his GPS device every few seconds, checking they were still on track. It was a weird procession they formed, all clad in black combat gear and black jackets, making their way through the cold, dark forest.  
Steve lowered his pace until he was walking next to her.  
“You’re shaking,” he said.  
“Hello, Captain Obvious,” she remarked sarcastically. “It’s freezing, in case you hadn’t noticed”  
He smirked, but became serious again after a second. “Recap,” he said.  
“Go in, get to the CC, stay there with Salinger and get control over the complex. Wait there until you give the all clear. Get out ASAP,” she recounted.  
“Good one,” Steve said. He tried to smile, but it was more of a grimace than anything else. He didn’t like her being here. He had said so himself back in Fury’s office and again when they boarded the carrier an hour ago. She didn’t even take it as an insult, no. She’d much rather be in Washington right now, but Fury was right – if their code really was written in this weird mixture of fictional languages, and S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have an experienced agent at hand who spoke them, it was the only possibility to get the prisoners out of there alive.  
They marched on in silence. Even Natasha wasn’t in a talkative mood and didn’t try to set Steve on a date, like she normally would. After a few minutes, Rumlow stopped abruptly, spreading out his right arm in warning. “We’ll set the decoy here,” he said. This meant that they were close to their goal. They had agreed on setting a decoy in close proximity, hoping to get a first response team out of the bunker and being able to enter the complex itself more quietly.  
The decoy was set and they wandered off in a different direction, with Jo only realizing now that they hadn’t taken the shortest way before.  
They walked on, and when they were called to another halt, she could see the outline of the rock formation from the holograph in Fury’s office from where they were standing. A few moments later, she could hear an explosion, shouts and screams from where they had been standing before. So that’s what a decoy does, she thought to herself. She was still shaking, and now it wasn’t only the cold. Things had gotten real now.  
It was only a few moments later that people, masked, dressed in dark gear, heavily armed, appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Jo held her breath. What if they were found?  
One of the men took out a strange device, stopped where he was standing and stared at it for several moments. Jo could feel the blood pumping in her veins, feel the blood rushing in her ears. What if they were found? But the man put the device back in one of his many pockets and stormed after the others.  
Jo breathed again.  
“It’s the jackets,” Natasha explained quietly, even though she hadn’t asked. “They make you pretty much untraceable. Even warmth-cameras cannot find you if you’re wearing one of those”  
Steve was watching as the men disappeared in the forest, then looked at his watch. After about a minute, he stared at the place where the men had appeared. “Let’s go,” was all he said.

It was quiet in the bunker, much too quiet for her liking. They had separated shortly after entering it, with Steve, Natasha and the others going further down, looking for the hostages, and Jo and Agent Salinger making their way to the CC.  
They stopped in front of a heavy steel door, Salinger beckoning her to be quiet. How he could be so sure that this was the door they needed to tear down she didn’t know.  
Jo knew what was going to come, but still, when Salinger kicked the door open and shot the three men standing in there immediately, it came as a shock. She moved back to the wall, her eyes wide open, her pulse running, breathing heavily. Salinger secured the room and then came over to her, taking her into the room, leading her away from the bodies and placing her in front of a wall of monitors. All of them were blank.  
“Remember this,” he said. “It’s either them or you. And they won’t be sorry. Ever”  
She nodded, shrugging off her thick jacket, trying to calm herself, at least a little.  
“Ready?” Salinger asked.  
Jo nodded slowly and put the earpiece out of her pocket and on her ear. She looked at the keyboard and its strange signs. “They’re Klingon…” she said astonished. Salinger looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and went back to the door to close it. “I mean, it’s just kinda cheap…” Jo added quietly and started to type various orders on the keyboard. Green writing appeared on the screen, in Latin letters, but the words were still mostly fictional. She continued to type in orders.  
“Hey, I know that one,” Salinger said, standing next to her again. “It’s circle”  
“Almost,” Jo replied absentmindedly. “It’s circuit... Okay” She looked up. “We’re getting there. I hacked the cameras and turned off voice detection,” she told Salinger as the green letters vanished from the screen and black and white videos appeared. “Cap, you hear me?” She held the communication tool on her right wrist to her mouth, feeling weird by doing so. “Where are you?”  
“Third floor down” She heard Steve’s voice as if he was standing next to her.  
“They’re in the fourth, down the hallway, heavily guarded by at least twenty men. I’ll lock the levels downwards. You better be quick, they’ll kill them if they hear you coming”  
“Give us two minutes, then turn off the lights and unlock the doors”  
“Copied”  
It was the longest two minutes in her life. She counted every second of them until finally Salinger nodded and she typed in new orders.  
“Get going,” she said in her communicator. She didn’t get a reply. Salinger gave her a USB-Stick, sporting S.H.I.E.L.D.’s emblem. Fury had given her the task of extracting data to get information on the organization of which they didn’t even know the name yet. She put the stick into the port, typed in a few orders and watched how the download started.

The door burst open, and before she realized it, two men came in, Salinger jumped up, stood in front of her, shot the first man. When he aimed for the other man, this one fired a single shot, hitting Salinger square in the chest. He fell down immediately, a crumpled heap of human on the floor.  
“Look who’s there,” the man said in a strange accent, drawing closer. Jo backed away, breathing fast; with every step the man took she took one backwards until she hit the far wall. He didn’t stop and went on until he was standing right in front of her, only inches away. “Look who’s there,” he said again, his breath smelling of cigarettes.  
Her breathing became ever faster, until he held up his gun and put it on her chest. Suddenly she relaxed, took a deep breath, and before she knew what she was doing, she shoved the gun away, punched her elbow in his stomach, ducked out of his reach, grabbed his wrist with her left hand and turned it on his back, twisting it hard until he yelped in pain and let go of the gun. She kicked him hard in the back of his knees and then against his head. He sacked away. It had happened in the matter of a second. She kicked the gun away to the far end of the room and rushed to Salinger, turning him on his back. His dark coat glinted from the blood flowing from the wound in his chest.  
“No,” she breathed. “No, no, no, no, no, don’t do this to me, no…” She placed her left hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse. It was there, faint, but there. She opened his coat, trying to locate the wound, and put her hands on it to stop the blood flow.  
Salinger’s eyes flickered open. Her heart seemed to miss a beat. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, stay with me, okay? It’s gonna be fine, yeah, just don’t fall asleep, okay? Please?”  
“The gun. Take… the gun,” he croaked.  
“I... the... what? The gun? Okay. Yeah. I take the gun, okay,” she stammered, taking the gun out of his right hand. She heard a noise from behind her. The man who had shot Salinger was trying to get up again. She hadn’t hit his head hard enough. She held the gun, her hands shaking hard, aimed for his back, pulled the trigger. He fell down, and Jo almost fell backwards from the repercussion.  
“Josephine, get the lights!” Steve’s voice was like a slap in the face. She got up, the gun still in her hand, ran to the computer and typed the order in.  
“Lights on,” she said into the communicator, her voice hollow, rushing back to Salinger on the floor.  
“Now get out,” he said.  
“I can’t,” she breathed. “We were attacked.”  
“Don’t move.”


End file.
